A Creature of Moonlight (29 page)

Now he's the one who looks away, and while he talks, he faces out onto the grasses and the bushes, where the wind sends ripples across the hill and the sun strikes dazzles along the path's rocky dirt. “You were growing up,” he says. “They were all after you: the village lads, the lords, and . . . the others. You didn't want any of them. You wanted to stay with me here, growing flowers until you died. But it wasn't going to be like that, Marni. Not for you. It couldn't be.

“You were—what, sixteen? I'd seen it before. I saw it with your friend, Annel. She wasn't ready for whatever was coming her way. She didn't want it, so she ran, just as your mother had run. And they, both of them, had a thousand more reasons to stay than you did—and neither of them had the very trees folding in around them, coming in closer every day. You didn't realize, maybe, but I knew. I knew one afternoon you wouldn't come back from the woods.

“Oh, yes, I knew,” he says with the twitch of a smile, turning back toward me. “You thought you were so clever, my girl. But you had so little happiness, and so much to weigh on you, and I didn't want to take away the bit of freedom you had. You weren't yet the age for the fairies to be whisking you away.

“Until one day, you were.

“And I couldn't stand it.” His voice has dropped from his storytelling lilt to the murmur of a confession. “I couldn't stay here to see you disappear too, wait to see whether or not you'd ever come back, with a baby or without one. I couldn't lose you, Marni.”

“What did you do?” I say. His every word is sounding in me now, shifting everything I thought I knew. “What did you do to stop me?”

“I made a deal,” he says. “I knew that as long as I was around, there'd be no place for you at court, and that was the farthest I could get you away from all this.” He sweeps a hand around the porch, the yard, through the door toward the back. “Not just the woods, but the loneliness, the exile. He promised to find you a place in the king's castle, to watch you, to keep you from the woods if he could manage it.”

“You made a deal with the king?” I say. I scarce can credit such a thing.

But he is laughing quietly, shaking his head. “No, Marni,” he says. “The king knew nothing about it.”

“Who, then?” I say.

He pauses, his face all serious. “I'm not sure I should tell you. You had a vengeful streak, even as a child. There was a village boy once, a year or two older than you, who went stomping around in the daffodils when his mother wasn't looking. Do you remember this?”

I shake my head.

“Oh, you screamed when you saw it. You vowed destruction upon the poor lad, who went crying to his mother. You thought it was the worst of crimes to ruin the flowers. You wanted to tear out his eyes and roll him in mud and shred his little boots until the offending soles were strips of leather.” He's chuckling. I don't think he's ever told me this before. “You would have punished that rascal to within an inch of his life if he hadn't looked up at his mother, all teary-eyed and scared to death, and begged her not to let the witch get him.”

“The
witch?
” I say.

He shrugs. “Well, there were stories then about what you might grow up to be. The boy must have heard his parents talking. The mother apologized to me, of course, and I would have been a great deal angrier about it, except it gave you a harmless method for getting your revenge.”

“I cast a spell on him,” I say.

“You cast a spell on him. You gathered up your roots and your fly wings or whatever it was you thought would be magical enough, and you chanted your little heart out and sent him a plague, or nightmares or something similar.”

“I hope I didn't really,” I say.

He looks at me. “Could you have?”

I don't answer that. In truth, I don't know. “Did anything bad happen to him?”

“He grew up a happy and healthy young lad,” my Gramps says, “and with no hard memories, or anyway nothing that kept him from coming by to court you twelve years later.”

“Jack?” I say.

“Henry.”

I nod, as though I remember one from the other anymore. I say, as if it's a joke, “I promise I won't cast a spell on whoever made you a deal.”

“Ah.” He doesn't say anything more for a moment. Then, “The Lord of Ontrei,” he says. “The one who walked down from the castle to ask for your hand.”

“I remember.” I wonder what he knows of my months in the city, of how I could never forget that day now.

“The things he said—I knew he was right. Roderick had left us alone for so many years, I didn't want to think it would change. But the woods were moving, and Roderick had always believed your mother's death had sent them back the last time they were coming in. He's not a bloodthirsty man, Marni, but when he thinks a thing must be done to keep his kingdom safe, he does not hesitate to do it. And Lord Edgar's words—they showed me how your uncle's mind was turning yet again, this time against you.”

“And?” I say, a whisper. “What did you do?”

“You made it clear that you would go nowhere if I was still around. And in any case, I thought Roderick would be more likely to take you in if I wasn't here. No king feels completely safe while his predecessor's living just next door.

“So the next day, when I woke and you'd disappeared again into the woods, I sent a message with a farmer's boy to the Lord of Ontrei at the castle. He came down to the hut, and we made a deal. I would disappear, make it seem as though I had died. When you came back home—if you came back home—the Lord of Ontrei would be there to offer you a place, to bring you back to the castle with him, to give you a new life.”

“You meant me to marry him.”

My Gramps smiles, but it's tentative. “I never told him that you would. But he agreed the castle was the safest place for you to be, both from the woods and from the king. With all the lords and ladies there to watch, we thought he'd hesitate before doing you any violence. And I think Lord Edgar had some idea that he could win you after a time.”

Oh, didn't he just. “Where did you go?” I say.

“Lord Edgar sent me away with some of his men. They put me on a horse and took me with them, all the way to the Ontrei estate on the northern meadows.”

“You didn't even take your cane.”

“Authenticity,” he says. “We thought of everything.”

“I see.” And I do—how they'd been anticipating my every move. How they'd figured it all out—that I'd go straight to the castle, that I'd begin to fall for Edgar. Only it hadn't turned out quite as they'd planned. “You were wrong, though, weren't you? It didn't matter to the king in the end whether I was there or here, not with the woods still moving in like they were. He was bent on taking my head no matter what you did.”

“Yes,” says my Gramps. “Both of us got that part wrong. We misjudged—him, the woods . . .” He's looking as if he wants to say more, but he pauses.

I dash a hand across my cheeks, angrylike, and blink my eyes back into focus.

“Marni, if I'd known—”

I don't let him finish. “What did they do with you, then, when the trees came in? I reckon Lord Edgar's place was well buried by them.”

“It was a funny thing,” he says. “On three sides of us were the trees, going farther and farther south, but his house and his yard and his stables—they were spared. It was like an island in a sea of green. I'd never seen a thing like that.”

I stare at him. “Yes, you have,” I say, slow.

“You mean this hut? I heard it was left alone as well, but I never saw it. I never came back until the woods were nearly gone.”

“No,” I say. “I mean when you went with the army up north, those seventeen years ago. I mean when they killed my mother.”

Now it's his turn to stare. He doesn't ask how I would know such a thing. Maybe he figures I've seen people and gone places he'd not be able to imagine since we last spoke. Well, and I have.

“It's still there,” I go on. “Still untouched by the woods, that house and their garden and their stones. I reckon—I reckon the same thing that kept back the dragon's woods there kept them back from you, too. You both were willing to stand up to him, weren't you, to keep him from what he wanted? You—and her.”

“You've been there.” It's a breath, no question in it.

I nod.

It seems the world must have turned itself over and inside out since we started talking, or at least that the sun would have gone clear across the sky or the birds would have changed their songs. But no. When we stop long enough to hear it all, to see it all again, it's just as it was. It's a perfect day, really. Breezy, sunny, blue and green, not a drop of rain or an ominous cloud. This is how I remember every summer day of my childhood. I reckon children don't feel cold and heat as much as older folks. I reckon if the sun is shining and they're able to run through a meadow, pick flowers, sing themselves a song, any day seems like this one.

My Gramps was drawing something before I came riding down to the hut. I see the charcoal and the bit of paper on the table, one part covered by his hand, the other showing half a face—a woman's face that looks to be smiling.

I reach out to the pull the sketch toward me; he lifts his hand.

Her eyes are crinkled up as she laughs; her head turns slightly, as though listening for something, as though ready at any moment to run off on another adventure. She's like me, I can tell, but she's all her own, too. There won't be another just like her, as there won't be another Gramps or another just like me.

“Marni,” my Gramps says into the silence, and his voice is rough and raw, so that for an instant I think myself back in the dragon's cave, peering into the dragon's bottomless eyes. “What is that on your hand?”

The ring has started to stick on my finger already; it doesn't want to slide, but I work at it until it's slipping down into my palm, gleaming golden in the porch's shade.

I hand it to him. “It was hers.”

He lifts it up and twists it around, reading the inscription. “I gave her this,” he says. “I suppose she left it behind when she ran from us. You'll have found it in the castle?”

“No,” I say. “She brought it with her. I found it
there
, where the woods never dared move in.”

He looks up at me, scare able to believe it. “She kept it all that time?”

“It's true,” I say. “It's yours. She'd want you to have it.”

“No.” He holds it out to me; he puts it back in my hand. “I had a lifetime with her. I don't need a ring to remember that.” Then, quieter, “I don't deserve a ring to remember that.”

“Gramps—”

“Tell me, Marni,” he says, now looking me full in the face. “I realize I maybe don't deserve this, either, but tell me what you're planning on doing now.”

For a moment I don't say a thing. There's a part of me, still, the part I fed for sixteen years with bitterness, that wants to walk away from this man and never come back—to run all the way over the mountains maybe, to the queen's land, with its sorcerers and its wide, shining sea. It's the way he was ready to use me, as much as Edgar ever did, to make all my choices for me. It's the way he left me alone, without a word to give me hope that he lived. He was ready never to see me again. There's nothing he has the right to claim from me now.

It's not often, though, is it, that you learn what you should do before it's too late to change a thing. I reckon my Gramps must have felt that way many a time, thinking on what happened to his daughter, thinking of the thousand ways he might have been able to save her. I reckon the dragon might have felt it, even, when I came up to his cave and told him, straight and clear, what he'd done to her. Some, like the king, never do figure it out.

I bend across the table, kiss my Gramps's cheek. I smile at him. I say, “I've never thanked you, Gramps, for saving my life and all.”

“You don't need to, Marni,” he says. “It's what a Gramps is for.”

So then, because it's what a granddaughter's for, I reach over and take his hands. I say, “Gramps, there's nowhere I'd rather be than right here. I'm going nowhere, you hear? Not to the woods, not to live with the king in his castle—not every day, at least. I'll go as much as is needed to keep the lords calm. And as for the rest—well, it's what I've always said I wanted, isn't it? You and me, Gramps, and the flowers.”

I watch him. He's twisted his head away from me. I know this look, though. I've seen it many times when he thought I couldn't: at night when he thought I was asleep; before the fire when Annel would tell a story somewhat too close to home, and he'd tilt his head so that the firelight burned right into his eyes, so he could blame his tears on that if we ever asked, which we never would have. We wouldn't have done that to him.

He clutches my hands with both of his. I see him shudder, and then, as he's never done, as he's never let himself do since as long as I remember, and I remember many long years, he lets his posture, his dignity go, and he bends forward until his forehead is against our gathered hands.

This man, who was once a king, and he's sobbing over his granddaughter's fingers.

I get up, leaving him one hand, and I go around to put my other arm across his back, my face on his shoulder.

We stay like that. The sun sparkles on the stones of our path. The birds call from their bushes.

It's a while before we move again, and when we do, there's no more need for talking. Gramps dries his eyes, ruffles my hair. After a moment he picks up the sketch from the table and puts it in his shirt pocket with the charcoal.

I haven't said nothing about that drawing, and I don't reckon I ever will. There's some things words would only ever make more difficult. I came back to him, just as he came for me all those years ago. But that won't ever fix it, not what happened to her, not the way your breath is still like to rush out at the slightest reminder, leaving you all hollow, wishing for impossible things.